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Comment by mattdeboard | Hacker News Reader

I understand NASA's PR team wants to make these headlines appealing to general audiences, and generate pageviews, but they're making the mistake of overpromising in the headline and underdelivering in the copy.

To normal people -- i.e. Not HackerNews readers -- read reservoir and think of a resource we can tap for our curren needs, a "reserve" of water. It's not that at all. NASA's PR team isn't doing their scientists any favors. It's not some egregious sin or anything but I'd have chosen a different headline altogether. Or maybe I'm just being a nitpicky former PR guy.

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The title on HN ("NASA finds water reservoir equivalent to 140 trillion times the world's oceans") is not the title NASA uses on its article ("Astronomers Find Largest, Most Distant Reservoir of Water"). It appears to be have created by mashing together the first two sentences of the article - the first describes it as a reservoir, the second describes its size relative to the earth's oceans.

Don't blame NASA, blame the submitter.

I'd blame NASA for using the word "reservoir".

I really don't think the regular layperson is going to be confused into thinking we can tap into it as needed when NASA describe it as the "Most Distant Reservoir of Water" right there in the headline, the first sentence of the article describes it as the "furthest reservoir of water", and the next explains it is "12 billion light-years away".

And even if this hypothetical layperson doesn't know how far a light-year is, 12 billion certainly gets across the point that it is an awful lot of them.

If we can't tap into it, then it certainly isn't a reservoir. For headline readers like myself, the choice of words is misleading.

Not sure why this comment is being downvoted. It's technically accurate. The definition of "reservoir" implies that a body of water is being collected or stored for later use. A reservoir need not be artificially constructed (i.e., a well or drainage pool), but in order to be a "reservoir," it needs to be put to use or accessible for use.

I am not a PR person myself, but I think the vast majority of laypeople who stumble across the headline "large, distant reservoir" would assume that the source is tappable. They might also ignore or not really understand the issue of the 12 billion light years -- or the inconvenience, to say the least, of the quasar nearby.

I actually think this was a good move by the PR. I think most people understand that space travel is in its newest form and by calling it a reservoir NASA is challenging science so that one day this distant water can become a practical reservoir.

Yes we just need to travel back in time to just after the beginning of the universe to use it. Oh, and it's also a long way away.

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